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Hands of destiny
Football upset spared BC players from tragedy 50 years ago
By Larry Tye, Globe Staff, 11/27/1992
d Burns can still hear the sirens.
Sirens from fire engines and ambulances. Sirens that "kept coming and coming." Screeching sirens that drowned out the big band music Burns and his fellow Boston College football players had been swinging to at the Statler ballroom that night 50 years ago tomorrow.
Then there was the smoke, right below him in the street, and scores of people milling around, as if in a daze, watching the swank Cocoanut Grove nightclub go up in flames.
It wasn't until he left his hotel the next morning that Burns smelled the "awful stench" of the fire and all it had consumed, that he saw the bodies in the Statler lobby, charred bodies covered with blankets, and began to consider that one of those bodies could have been his. Or that of his girlfriend, now his wife.
After all, a large horseshoe table had been reserved for Burns and his teammates right in the center of the Cocoanut Grove, to celebrate the top- ranked team's expected triumph that afternoon over lowly Holy Cross. But Holy Cross inexplicably trounced BC, 55-12, and Burns and his buddies opted for a private party at the Statler, now the Park Plaza.
"I've been thinking about it all my life," Burns, now 70 and living in Arlington, said last week. "I figure it was an act of the good Lord.
"I'm a Catholic, and I believe that when the good Lord decides my time is up, it's up. But he decided it wasn't up then."
Ed Murphy, captain of the triumphant Holy Cross team, had an equally close brush with destiny the evening of Nov. 28, 1942. And he's equally thankful to have lived to tell about it.
Murphy and several teammates were on the way to the Cocoanut Grove when they were intercepted by an aide of Boston's mayor, Maurice Tobin. Tobin, it seems, was having a party at the Parker House. But it wasn't much of a party, so hizzoner thought he'd spice it up by inviting the BC and Holy Cross captains.
"Mayor Tobin probably saved our lives . . . I sure do feel lucky," said Murphy, 73. Less lucky were the two girls who went to the Cocoanut Grove to hold tables for the Holy Cross players. "One didn't get out," Murphy said. "The other got out and got pretty much scarred from it."
Does he agree with Burns that divine intervention helped his Crusaders drub the Eagles that day, keeping BC players away from the nightclub?
"There was a lot of talk like that from the media after the game, saying it was an act of God that we won," Murphy said. "To me, it was a group of good football players beating another group of good football players."
That the 1942 BC Eagles were good football players was beyond dispute. There was star running back Mike Holovak, who went on to play for the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Bears, to coach BC and the Boston Patriots, and is currently the general manager of the Houston Oilers. There was a supporting cast that included tackle Gil Bouley and guard Mario Gianelli, who also had distinguished college and pro careers.
Many insist the squad of 50 years ago, with its unyielding defense and unstoppable attack, was the best ever assembled at the Jesuit school.
Consider its record going into the traditional season-ender against Holy Cross: It had edged powerhouses such as Clemson and the North Carolina Naval Flight School and slaughtered teams such as West Virginia, Wake Forest, Fordham and Georgetown. All told, BC outscored opponents, 249-19, posted shutouts in five of its eight contests and surrendered an average of just 29 yards per game.
A Sugar Bowl bid against unbeaten Tulsa seemed in the cards, and with it a chance for BC's first national title.
Holy Cross, by contrast, neared the end of its season with a 4-4-1 record. Each of its wins were shutouts, but it also lost to four mediocre teams and hadn't cracked the national rankings.
Records, however, don't mean much when it comes to a rivalry as long, as spirited and as contentious as this one. One game, saved for the end because it's the best, could make up for whatever sins a team committed the rest of the season. Much the way it does in such other cherished rivalries as Harvard- Yale and Red Sox-Yankees.
BC began facing off against Holy Cross in football in 1896, and the contest became an annual event in 1920. Even today, six years after the two Catholic schools stopped playing one another, mere mention of the rivalry can touch off animated discussion and heated debate.
Part of the intensity back in the 1940s had to do with the fact that "Holy Cross looked down on BC," explained Rev. William Commane, a fullback on the '42 Eagles squad and now pastor at St. Margaret's Parish in Saugus. "BC was a small day school started by immigrants to teach their sons. Holy Cross was a boarding school, serving the elite."
The faceoff in 1942 spawned even more interest and hype -- partly because it took place just a year after the United States declared war against Germany and Japan. A war that most players from both schools were about to join and that had Americans here and elsewhere drawing their shades at night, pinching their pennies and looking to a big football game like this as a momentary diversion from the upheaval around them.
Then there were the rumors, ripe even as the game got under way at Fenway Park, that nailing down a win against Holy Cross would ensure BC a place at the all-important Sugar Bowl. And, with oddsmakers favoring BC 4-1, Eagles fans already were planning their New Year's trip to New Orleans.
But it was not to be.
Holy Cross manhandled BC's vaunted defense, running over and around its linemen and peppering its secondary with passes. It got on the board first with a 48-yard drive, capped by a 1-yard plunge by fullback Bobby Sullivan, and ran the score to 55-6 before the Eagles managed their second touchdown.
While Holy Cross repeatedly made its tackles stick, BC had to gang up on Crusader runners to bring them down. And while Holy Cross proudly showed off its new single-wing offense, BC's highly-touted T-formation didn't give the Eagle fans in the sellout crowd of 41,350 much reason to cheer.
Some attributed the win to the shrewd strategy of Holy Cross coach Ank Scanlan; others blamed lapses in BC's planning and preparation. There also were those who tried to read a larger meaning into the unexpected results, a view made more intriguing by the strange fact that 55 and 12, the two teams' scores, also happened to be the jersey numbers of the BC cocaptains.
Whatever the reason, the result, as Globe sportswriter Jerry Nason wrote the next day, was that Holy Cross played the kind of football Boston College had been playing all season long. And vice versa.
"It's one of those things that happens, that's all," added Amerino Sarno, BC's line coach that day. "When the roof caves in there isn't much you can do about it."
Gianelli tried to put the big loss out of his mind as he dressed to go out that night a half-century ago. "My sister-in-law asked where I was going," the 72-year-old former lineman remembered. "I said, 'We're going to Cocoanut Grove."
But Holovak, who was driving Gianelli and his date, had other ideas. "Mike said we're not going to Cocoanut Grove, we're going to the Statler," Gianelli explained. "I said, 'I don't care where we go.'
"We just stopped by Cocoanut Grove but didn't go in."
At about 10 that night someone at the Statler told him there was a fire at the nightclub a block away. Gianelli could hear the sirens and, looking out his hotel window, saw "everyone running around. Everyone was parked all over the place."
There wasn't much he or his teammates could do, so several went to a party at the nearby Kenmore Hotel. Yet, "as the night was wearing on it dawned on me I'd told my sister-in-law and a couple other people that we'd be going to the Cocoanut Grove," he said. "It dawned on me I'd better get a hold of them.
"But I couldn't get a cab to drive back to Everett. Radios kept blaring for cabs to get over to the Cocoanut Grove and assist the fire department with the bodies."
Father Commane also had planned to be at the Cocoanut Grove that night, but like his teammates, he ended up at the Statler. "When I heard first about the fire was when some people in the lobby came in from the Cocoanut Grove. We were upstairs but looked out the window and saw smoke just across the street," he said.
"I didn't know the extent of the fire, but when I came out of the Statler, I had the family car. It took us about two hours to get home. All the streets were shut off, and we had to go through Brighton to get to Dorchester.
"The next day, I was listening to the radio at home with my family. They read out the names all day, it was a terrible tragedy. The football game didn't mean much after that."
The Parker House was a long way from the Statler and the Cocoanut Grove, but things were equally frenetic.
"We heard fire teams going by around 10 o'clock," recalled Murphy. "I remember the fire commissioner, who was at our party, running over to the window, looking down and saying, 'There go my boys.' We figured it was just another fire in Boston.
"A little while later, a half hour or 15 minutes, people came in to get him. I'm pretty sure Mayor Tobin and the commissioner left about 10:30 to go to the fire.
"I sure do feel lucky" not to have ended up at Cocoanut Grove, added Murphy, who has spent the last 47 years coaching football at Dracut High.
Holovak said in a telephone interview that "if I ended up there, you wouldn't be talking to me now."
While none of the BC or Holy Cross players was among the 492 people consumed by the fire, both teams did suffer losses. Larry Kenney, the Eagles equipment manager, died. So did Joseph Boratyn, starting fullback for the '41 Crusaders.
Members of the 1942 BC squad didn't have much time 50 years ago to mourn Kenney or share other memories of the tragedy. They shipped out for war duty almost immediately afterward, and when they returned, many relocated to other parts of the country.
"Uncle Sam took care of any chance of reminiscing," said Eddie Lambert, a backup end on the '42 squad who served in the Navy, taught and coached at Boston Latin School, Cathedral High and Dorchester High and was a senior administrator in the Boston public schools. "We were all in the service within weeks.
"I haven't thought about the fire too often. I think more about the fact that we got walloped that day and missed the Sugar Bowl, and the Orange Bowl invited us as a consolation."
BC couldn't regain its form at the Orange Bowl, however, and lost to Alabama, 37-21. The last AP poll of the year put BC in eighth place, a mere 11 spots in front of archrival Holy Cross.
That sad ending to a triumphant season will be one of many topics Lambert and his teammates hope to talk about at this year's Orange Bowl, where they've been invited to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their game against Alabama. Many on the '42 BC team say they'll be there, and some plan to make a side trip that morning to Tampa, where this year's Eagles will play in the Hall of Fame Bowl against Tennessee.
Another thing they'll probably talk about is the version of events at Cocoanut Grove offered by Bouley, their impressive tackle who went on to play with the LA Rams. He breaks ranks with most of his teammates by insisting that only five players were invited to the swanky nightclub the night of the fire, that the invitation came from a local sportswriter, and that the rest of the team always planned to go to the Statler the same way they did after every game.
"People said it was lucky Boston College lost the game and that players were safe from the fire," Bouley said last week. "I've resented that story from the minute it was printed. That involved five guys. Nobody else would have gone."
Pauline Gianelli, Mario's wife, tells a different story, one that her husband and other members of the '42 BC squad echo. "Mario's whole family thought he was over there," she said.
"If they hadn't lost that game, we would have lost all those BC guys."
This story ran on page 63 of the Boston Globe on 11/27/1992.
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